Evacuation completed from ferry
Print Edition
THE evacuation of the Greek ferry that caught fire off Albania has been completed, and only the vessel’s captain and four Italian sailors remain on board to assist in the operation, Italian Premier Matteo Renzi said yesterday. Renzi said they would remain on the ferry “Norman Atlantic” to hook it up to a tug boat.
Helicopters defied high winds, stormy seas and darkness yesterday to pluck hundreds of passengers from the ferry as survivors told of a frantic rush to escape the flames and pelting rain. The navy said the latest numbers indicate 414 people have been rescued from the ferry, and seven bodies removed.
The ferry company had originally said there were 478 passengers and crew on board the ferry. Officials couldn’t explain the discrepancy between the numbers.
The dead included a Greek man who died after being trapped in a lifeboat chute, and four others whose bodies were recovered from the sea earlier yesterday. There was no immediate word on where the other two bodies were recovered.
Exhausted and cold from their ordeal, 49 passengers reached land in the Italian port of Bari, more than 24 hours after fire broke out on a car deck of the ferry making a journey from the Greek port of Patras to Ancona in Italy.
Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samras said the “massive and unprecedented operation saved the lives of hundreds of passengers following the fire on the ship in the Adriatic Sea — under the most difficult circumstances.”
A picture emerged of a panicked reaction as the fire spread, with passengers choking on the smoke and struggling to figure out how to reach safety as they suffered both searing heat and driving rain outside.
A Greek truck driver said the fire alarm came after most passengers, alerted by smoke filling their cabins, had gone outside. “Our feet were burning and from the feet up we were soaked,” Christos Perlis, 32, said. When rescue helicopters arrived, Perlis said passengers began to panic.
“Everyone there was trampling on each other to get onto the helicopter,” said Perlis, who said he and another man tried to impose order.
“First children, then women and then men. But the men, they started hitting us so they could get on first. They didn’t take into consideration the women or the children, nothing,” Perlis said.
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